


Forgotten by Morning

by mayhap



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: First Time, M/M, Rimming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-11
Updated: 2012-01-11
Packaged: 2017-10-29 08:56:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/318035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayhap/pseuds/mayhap
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I’m about to get fucked by Robert Baratheon, Ned thought dizzily. Afterward I can compare notes with half the beddable women in Westeros.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forgotten by Morning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bevita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bevita/gifts).



Eddard Stark fell to his knees like they’d been cut out from under him. A late spring frost crunched the grass beneath his weight, but as ever, the bloodsap eyes of the heart tree caught all of his attention. Those eyes seemed to bore right through him, but the tight red lips slashed into the white bark would not resolve into either condemnation or approbation of what they read there.

Outside the North, few men had ever seen a heart tree, much less prayed to one. Lord Arryn, always so courteous, had actually apologized to his ward when Ned had arrived at the Eyrie, explaining that the Arryns had not cut down their godswood, as so many southern lords had done, but rather no weirwood trees had ever taken root in the space that had been planned for them, so high and thin and rocky. Since the age of eight, then, though he had kept the old gods as faithfully as he knew how, most of his prayers had been said without the anchoring presence of a heart tree to fix them, and he wondered, now, if he had not been lost for years.

Robert Baratheon prayed to the Seven, of course, but no more often than necessary, and he was never troubled by them in between. Many things seemed to rest lightly on Robert’s broad, muscular shoulders, and when Ned had stood with him, with Jon Arryn standing behind them, raising his banners on their behalf, anything had seemed possible. Now he stood alone, the Stark in Winterfell where his lord father should have been, where his brave brother Brandon should have been at his side, where his sister Lyanna ought to have been preparing for her wedding, and the thing he was about to do seemed weightier, the same way Robert’s great warhammer that Ned could barely lift seemed light and easy in Robert’s hands. On the morrow he would call his bannermen—bannermen, now, for all that many had scarcely known him since he was a boy of eight, but they would follow him, he knew, for the love they had borne his father and brother—and add them to Robert’s men, but before the unswerving gaze of the heart tree, he could not deny that their rebellion was a perilous and uncertain one, for all its justice.

And if these were the only matters that troubled him as he prayed, they would be meet and proper burdens to fall on the new Lord of Winterfell, but no man could tell himself half-truths before a heart tree, and Ned was not only thinking of Robert as his friend, his ally, his would-be king. Shame and arousal washed through him in equal measure as he remembered, vividly, obscenely, but he forced himself not to look away, and of course the tree would not.

It had been the night before they had fought their way out of Gulltown—their first real battle might have been a skirmish only, but it was still infinitely more real than any mere tourney, no matter how grand. Robert, never the most restful of men, had been jumpy as a three-legged cat, fiddling with pieces of his armor, rearranging his bedroll instead of lying on it, and generally driving Ned to distraction.

“It’s Lord Arryn, Gods damn his eyes,” Robert had confessed, half-shamefacedly, in response to Ned’s steady, querying gaze. “He’s told all the camp followers not to come within a league of me on pain of death.”

This had startled a laugh from Ned. “You should refrain from fucking the night before a battle,” he said, quoting the one piece of their foster-father’s sage advice that Robert had never even attempted to follow.

“What do you know of fucking? The both of you should be taking my advice on fucking, not trying to give it to me!” Robert retorted, but his own laughter was rueful. “You know I mean no dishonor to your lady sister,” he added anxiously, and Ned, who knew better than anyone in the Seven Kingdoms his friend’s love for the Lady Lyanna and his rage against Prince Rhaegal, and also knew that Robert needed to refrain from smashing any man’s brains out until the morrow, steered him back to what he thought the relatively harmless topic of fornication.

“I’m surprised you don’t have a woman concealed among your gear, or dressed as a page in your service,” he jested, and was rewarded with another roar of his friend’s infectious laughter.

“Her tits gave her away last time, you remember,” Robert said, slapping his leg. “No, Jon Arryn’s outfoxed me this time. Which is a quality I like to see in my commanders, mind you,” he added.

Ned was impressed by how casually he named the man who had been like a father to both of them one of his commanders and his heart swelled up in him as he thought, _Yes, this man could be king._

“But perhaps I should be looking to you for tips on how to conceal my women,” Robert added. “I’ve never seen you give one so much as a kiss, but surely you can’t have nineteen summers and still be a virgin! Tell me where you’re hiding her, Ned, and I promise I won’t so much as look at her, for our friendship’s sake,” he wheedled.

“I’ve told you, there is no one,” Ned said stiffly, feeling the dull color creep up his face.

“You blush just like a maiden,” teased Robert, delighted. “Of course, you can’t take that as a rule, for they flush up just as pretty while you’re fucking ‘em,” he added, seeming wholly diverted, if at the expense of Ned’s dignity, which he held a little more lightly than his honor.

“It’s why I’m insisting on a double wedding,” Ned returned, “I want someone with your wealth of experience nearby lest something should go amiss with the bedding.”

Robert pounded him on the shoulder, a blow that might have felled a lesser man. “The Lady Catelyn’s a lucky one,” he said heartily, and Ned wished he could believe it. The lady would marry him if Tully decided to take up their rebellion, to be sure, but any woman who had been expecting Brandon would surely be disappointed in him.

“D’you remember the game we used to play?” Robert went on, and Ned froze, because he was pretty sure he knew what Robert was talking about and he hoped that he was talking about anything else. “You didn’t even know how to spill your own seed until I showed you. I thought every boy figured that one as soon as his cock got big enough to stand up on its own.”

“A wise man is always ready to learn from an expert,” Ned rejoined, falling back on another of Lord Arryn’s oft-repeated maxims. It was a feeble enough jest, but Robert chortled appreciatively.

“You must be the champion of the Seven Kingdoms at it by now, if you’re still doing it for yourself every night,” Robert said. “I’d wager you could beat me nine times out of ten.”

That was how they had played it, when they were boys—as a race, to see which one could spill his seed the fastest. Robert had generally won, laughing, while Ned was half-paralyzed with fear that someone would catch them at it before he managed to finish himself off. Robert had liked to play this game best in places where someone might see or hear them: behind the stables, in the garden that had been meant for a godswood, even (on one very memorable occasion that even Robert hadn’t sought to repeat) over one of the parapets of the Eyrie into the thousands of feet of empty sky below. It had been a relief to Ned when his friend had turned his prodigious attentions to the bedding of women and the getting of bastards, in that Robert still managed to make him blush with his behavior but at least he was not involved quite so personally.

Or at least, he hadn’t been until now. If the sharp, speculative look Robert had been giving him wasn’t necessarily personal, the strong, speculative hand he slid down the front of Ned’s breeches certainly was. Ned cast a look over his best friend, his nearest living thing to a brother, his would-be king, and licked his lips. He knew Robert in his cups perfectly well, of course, and he knew equally well that he was not drunk now—more of Lord Arryn’s wise council about the night before battle, and besides, they had taken their evening meal together, standing up mouthfuls in between queries and orders. Whatever he saw in Robert’s eyes, it was _like_ drunkeness: blood-lust, the thirst for revenge, some other kind of madness that held sway over him this night. As Robert’s friend, ally, companion, he ought to have counseled good sense to him, but Ned could not pretend that all madness lay on one side when he felt himself grow half-hard just at the touch.

“There, now,” Robert said, as though he had won a wager that Ned hadn’t known he was laying. “You’ve a man’s needs just as I have, for all your moralizing. There’s no milk in your veins.” Robert’s hands were vigorous but not ungentle; Ned found himself thrusting against his palm like a stag in rut, and though he was disgusted with himself that he had been reduced so easily to this bestial need, he did not find that this made it any easier to stop. Robert, for his part, seemed amused, as though this were his greatest jest yet. “If we’re not to have any women tonight, we’ll just have to do for ourselves.”

Ned nodded as though Robert had just said something perfectly reasonable and did not point out that what they were doing already went beyond taking care of themselves. He let Robert jerk at the laces of his breeches and slide his prick free, bobbing up with damp eagerness. Robert grazed the tip once, the hardness of his thumb sliding against the slickness, and then he took away his hand entirely to strip off his own breeches with rapid, practiced movements. “Women’s things are more difficult to get off with all their knots and hooks and ribbons,” Robert remarked as, naked from waist down, trailing linen shirt-tails framing his own erection, he began stripping off Ned’s clothing. “You’re better off just ripping ‘em off and sending her a new dress to remember you by.”

“I’ll remember that,” Ned managed, half strangulated, as Robert found his prick again with one hand while reaching for his own with the other one. Ned was fully hard now, and he wasn’t sure what Robert expected him to do, and he was trying not to meet Robert’s eye and mostly ended up staring at his erect length instead.

Robert stroked them both together, once, twice, drawing Ned in so that the head of his cock brushed against Robert’s, and Ned gasped and jerked his hips again, breaking the contact without meaning to. Robert reached for him again, but this time he didn’t reach straight for Ned’s erection–he caught Ned’s arm, instead, and pulled him, boneless and pliant, to the floor of the tent.

 _I’m about to get fucked by Robert Baratheon,_ Ned thought dizzily. _Afterward I can compare notes with half the beddable women in Westeros._

Robert knelt up and nudged Ned’s knees apart, cupping his balls in one hand as if he wanted to find the weight of them, but then he brought his head down low and licked a hot, wet stripe along his upper thigh at the crease. Ned was so surprised that he couldn’t stop himself moaning, as wanton as a whore, and he bit his tongue lest someone should hear him and enter to catch Robert with his contraband. Robert was laughing at him again, hot breath and day-old stubble maddening against his skin. “Love using my mouth, makes ‘em wet, makes ‘em crazy,” Robert growled against his skin, finding the cleft between Ned’s cheeks and tonguing it, vigorously, repeatedly, until Ned was wild with it, squirming, saying, _stop_ , and saying, _more_ , wanting something, anything. He didn’t have words for what he wanted, and if he had he would have blushed to speak them aloud.

When Robert brought one blunt fingertip to join his tongue, he worried it up against Ned’s entrance, sliding it back and forth like he’d teased the hole of Ned’s dripping cock, until it was almost a relief when he slid it in to the first knuckle, working it in and out, pressing a little deeper every time. Ned reached down with the hand he wasn’t using to stop his own mouth and wrapped it around his prick, which was hard as a bar of iron and hot as if it were newly-forged. He stroked himself as Robert fucked him with his fingers, spreading his legs wider and wider, until he pulled his fingers out of Ned and felt for his own prick.

Robert hoisted Ned’s legs over his shoulders, half-lifting him off the ground as he slid his cock along Ned’s crack, pressing deeply from the hips. He used one hand to point himself toward Ned’s hole while the other sought out Ned’s cock, twining with his own. This time Robert thrust once, deeply, and Ned bit deeply into the flesh of his own thumb, rocking with the force of the fucking. He begged, incoherently, as Robert rode him toward climax, calling on the old gods or the new or anyone who might be listening, until it was all he could do to hold himself together through his own climax, spilling over in one explosive gush and then milking it with mingled pain and pleasure as Robert spent himself. He had a neat trick of silence that Ned with his bitten-off cries and bleeding thumb envied, but his face was expressive enough that Ned could imagine some of the things Robert might have said if they had not been in the middle of a military encampment, surrounded by potential listening ears.

Robert had seemed perfectly pleased with himself, after. They had cleaned up, gotten more or less dressed, and Robert had stretched out with that loose-limbed, just-fucked ease that Ned recognized all too well, and he had even managed to doze a few hours before morning. As far as Ned could tell, he didn’t think that they’d done anything particularly unusual, and certainly nothing worth talking about it.

Not that Ned wanted to talk about it. Not that Ned wanted to think about it. Except that he _was_ thinking about it, and the thought made him feel uncomfortably aroused, even as he knelt in the godswood and tried to pray.

The heart tree saw all, and said nothing.


End file.
